Sometimes the dogs begin to bark a moment before the earthquake hits, sensing something that their owners cannot. Sometimes you can feel a change in air pressure on your face just as the shaking is about to begin.
But usually the earthquakes in Oklahoma — as many as three a day — arrive without warning.
“You never know when it’s going
to happen,” said Ilke Crismon, a 75-year-old who grew up in Nuremberg under Allied bombing during the Second World War, and now lives on
a ranch outside the town of Glencoe. “We always had alarms before the bombers came. Here you just stand and get it.”
It wasn’t always like this. The cause, most Oklahomans and almost all scientists agree, is the millions of gallons of water fired underground during the oil extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”.
In the process of bringing out the oil, drillers release huge volumes of subterranean waste water, sometimes as much as 10 barrels of water for every one barrel of oil. They dispose of the waste water by pumping it back deep down into the earth through disposal wells. But the water pressure can agitate underground fault lines, which roar forth into earthquakes.
As Angela Spotts, an activist opposed to fracking, puts it, “They have literally broken pieces of Oklahoma apart and we’re constantly shaking.”
At the centre of America’s newest earthquake zone is Medford, a fading industrial town of around 1,000 people, where a rusting grain elevator towers over the largely empty streets.
The fields around the town are littered with small oil pumpjacks, and when The Daily Telegraph visited last week, there was a 3.3 magnitude earthquake 11 miles south of the town.
Although it was too far away to be felt, locals quickly found it on the smartphone apps they use to track the area’s daily quakes.
Between 1978 and 2008, Oklahoma averaged fewer than two significant earthquakes per year. In 2014, that number spiked to 585, including 19 that measured a powerful 4.0 magnitude or stronger.
While the quakes are not large enough to bring down homes, they send cracks through concrete floors. Locals fear it is only a matter of time before a gas pipe is ruptured, or some other serious accident occurrs.
It would therefore seem likely that the residents of Medford would be clamouring for a complete ban on fracking, like the one implemented in the more environmentally friendly New York state.
Far from it. Such is the financial boom from fracking that the majority of Oklahomans are still in favour.
Yard signs bearing anti-fracking messages are regularly torn up by neighbours who believe the environmentalists are putting jobs at risk.
“We know we have a long way to go,” said Spotts. “I don’t think the state will ever ban it.”
The oil boom has brought both money and new people to an otherwise quiet corner of Oklahoma. More tax dollars has meant new fire trucks, new ambulances and a $-700,000 street repaving effort — more than twice what Medford would have been otherwise able to afford.
A few savvy residents have become millionaires by selling drilling rights on their properties.
The environmentalist movement may ultimately get satisfaction from the slumping global oil price long before they convince the Republican state government to act. Fracking is an expensive method of extraction and cheap oil makes it difficult to turn a profit. Production is already falling as a result — but it remains to be seen if the earthquakes will also calm down.
“We always knew the oil money wouldn’t last forever,” said Margie Cink, standing at the Medford lunch counter she has manned for 34 years. At the peak of the fracking boom, she served 120 people every lunchtime, now that number has just sagged to 40. “It came and went and the earthquakes are still here.”
Was she worried about the constant shaking? No, she said before breaking into a smile.
“But if you come back in a year and the roof has fallen in you’ll know I should have been more worried.”